Real-time color grading

In this post, we’ll dig a little deeper into the real-time color grading performed by the Texture color grading node in Layer Layouts.

The node itself is very simple. In the Input texture pin, you connect the texture you want to perform color grading on. In the LUT pin, you should connect a Lookup table.

What is a Lookup Table?

A lookup table is an image that tells the computer how it should modify the color of each pixel. You can see an example of a LUT above. If you download the above image here, import it into Lightact and connect it via an Image reader node to the LUT input of the Color grading node, you’ll see that the output doesn’t really change.

An image of the layout.

[twenty20 img1=”9705″ img2=”9762″ width=”600px” offset=”0.5″]

That’s because the above image is a neutral LUT. It doesn’t cause any changes, but you’ll need it to create LUTs that will.

Once you have the adjustment layer in your LUT image you’ll see that it changed as well. If you created more adjustment layers you should copy all of them. You can save the modified LUT now, but don’t overwrite the original.

Great, now we just need to import the sample image and the new LUT and connect the layout as shown below:

As you can see the look inside Lightact is exactly the same as the one in Photoshop.